Andrew Meneely has a name and a sound that resonates across the centuries and across the Capital Region whenever church bells peal for Sunday services or the chimes of the carillon in the tower high atop Albany’s City Hall pour forth crisp, ringing tones that can be heard miles away.

Meneely was one of the greatest bell makers in American history and founder of the world-class Meneely Bell Foundry in West Troy, known today as Watervliet. More than 65,000 bells under the Meneely brand were cast between 1826 and 1952, when the business closed.

Meneely was a silversmith by training, an alchemist who mastered the mix of copper, tin and molten heat to produce bells of elemental beauty and exceptional functionality.

The Meneely sound, revered for its rich tone and exceptional quality, can be heard in the carillons at Cornell University and Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., as well as at churches in locales as far-flung as Hawaii, Canada, Taiwan and Guatemala.

Meneely was born in Watervliet and, at age 15, left school to become an apprentice for Julius Hanks, whose father worked with Paul Revere, and Nancy Hanks, a relative, who was Abraham Lincoln’s mother.

Meneely went into business with a son of Hanks, Horatio Hanks, and they moved to Auburn in Cayuga County in 1823 to operate a foundry that supplied equipment to the engineers of the Erie Canal. Three years later, after the canal was completed, Meneely returned to Watervliet to run a Hanks foundry there, which produced bells, clocks and engineering instruments.

Meneely married his mentor’s niece, Philena Hanks. The couple had three children.

By 1836, Meneely put his name on the foundry and Meneely & Company became one of the largest and most acclaimed bell foundries in the country. Soon its reputation spread internationally. Its bells were loaded onto barges and ships on the Hudson River near the foundry and were sent around the world.

The bell casting business continued with Meneely’s sons, Edwin and George. When a third brother, Clinton Hanks Meneely, returned from serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, his brothers did not invite him to join the family business. He started a competitor, the Clinton H. Meneely Foundry of Troy. They went to court and the two older brothers lost their lawsuit, which sought to prevent Clinton from using the Meneely name on his bells. The rival foundries continued in Watervliet and Troy and together they churned out nearly half the bells commissioned each year across the country.

Fortunately, the patriarch did not live to witness his sons locked in a bitter fight. He died Oct. 14, 1851, in Troy. He was 49. He is buried in a family plot halfway up Middle Ridge Road, in Section 58, Lot 12, dominated by a plain marble obelisk, topped by an urn. There are no Meneely bells on the plot and no mention is made on the gravestones of the family’s eminence as bell makers.

Incidentally, the 156-year-old bell in the cemetery’s bell tower, on a hill just above the office, is a Meneely bell. In the early years of Albany Rural, it was tolled each time a horse-drawn funeral procession entered the grounds. It is rung only on special occasions now.

The life of Andrew Meneely brings to mind a poem by John Donne, “No Man Is An Island,” which concludes: “Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,/And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;/It tolls for thee.”